Gina Martin Adams and a Bank Rescue From the Inside

Barry Ritholtz is a Bloomberg View columnist. He founded Ritholtz Wealth Management and was chief executive and director of equity research at FusionIQ, a quantitative research firm. He blogs at the Big Picture and is the author of “Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy.”Read More.

This week on our Masters in Business podcast I sit down with Gina Martin Adams, institutional equity strategist for Wells Fargo Securities.

Adams was working as an economist at Wachovia Securities up until 2007, when she moved to the equity-research department. The timing was inauspicious: Within her first year on the job, the financial crisis hit Wall Street and sending Wachovia to the brink of collapse. She describes how Wachovia was in the process of being sold to Citigroup (with help from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.) when Wells Fargo came along to snatch it away from Citi, which turned out to be in as much trouble as Wachovia. The insider perspective of what takes place at a large bank during a rescue is a great tale.

Barry Ritholtz is a Bloomberg View columnist. He founded Ritholtz Wealth Management and was chief executive and director of equity research at FusionIQ, a quantitative research firm. He blogs at the Big Picture and is the author of “Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy.”Read more